


empathy

by KathrynShadow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Empathy, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, I mean I wrote this as & but you can squint and see / if you wanna, I won't judge, Kylo Ren Redemption, Kylo gets dragged into a redemption arc kicking and screaming and mostly crying the whole way, POV Kylo Ren, Redemption, Revan shows up as a meddling Force ghost for all of 30 seconds, Telepathy, someone loses a hand because it's Star Wars, telepathy sucks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-13 21:27:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13579266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathrynShadow/pseuds/KathrynShadow
Summary: He thought it was over.





	empathy

**Author's Note:**

> many much thank to ProtoDan for his betawork
> 
> tl;dr: I'm a sucker for Force bonds and the last time I saw one... well... forced it was in KotOR II and THAT DIDN'T TURN OUT SO GREAT NOW DID IT

_One._

He thought it was over. Snoke was dead, and he’d made it pretty clear that he was to blame for the… the rogue connection. The only time it had reoccurred after Snoke’s death, Rey had closed the door on him, and it had felt like it was as metaphorical as it was literal. And that was… that was good, that was for the best; he’d tried as much as he could, but she couldn’t _see_ what he saw, and he didn’t need people who didn’t believe in him.

_(like the entirety of the First Order doesn’t believe in him, like Snoke didn’t spend the entirety of his apprenticeship tearing him down, like)_

Kylo turns around one afternoon, maybe a week after the… the incident, and she’s there. He blinks. She frowns and drops… something in her hands; he doesn’t quite catch sight of it before it slips from her fingers and is gone from his awareness.

For a heartbeat, there is silence. And then, with a gnawing feeling like he’s giving an opening salvo in a bloody battle, he asks her: “What are you—”

She’s gone before he can even finish the sentence, spinning on her heel and walking through the wall. Behind her, a maintenance droid stares at him for a moment before beeping out a hesitant question.

Kylo shakes himself and starts off in pursuit. Unless they’ve managed to find a new base already, or they had a backup of their backup of their backup (neither of which would even surprise him at this point), she’s still on the _Falcon._ She can’t get far.

(Why does he even want to follow her anyway?)

He finds her again only two rooms away in a storage room, her illusory legs vanishing inside a real crate. Kylo focuses on that, the definite and absolute proof that she isn’t there, not really.

She doesn’t look tired. She looks guarded, closed off in a way that she wasn’t before but was before that; every muscle of her is tensed as if she’s getting ready for a fight, but that doesn’t make sense. He _tried_ fighting with this kind of projection. It did nothing.

(Is this the same kind? Some remnant scrap of his bond with his old Master, focused on and amplified? Or a different technique that Luke kept to himself?)

“I know what this is,” he only half lies. “It should be gone by now. Why are you _here?_ ”

Rey grits her teeth and says nothing.

“Snoke is dead,” he says, as if she doesn’t know, as if she wasn’t there (trusting him, he knew that, he _felt_ that; she was scared, but she still knew he wasn’t he wouldn’t he _couldn’t_ ). “He should have taken this with him.”

Silence. Her eyes slide past his face to something he can’t see. She shakes her head and laughs, her hand darting up to rub the back of her neck in a gesture that looks effortlessly chagrined. “No, I’m fine,” she says. “It’s nothing, I just… thought I left the caf on.”

Kylo bites his tongue. He shifts his weight to his other foot, preparing to just sit and wait for her to be done talking to whoever wandered in, but… but she doesn’t. She wanders back out through the wall without even giving him a cursory glance.

It bothers him more than it ought to.

 

_Two._

She appears across the table while he’s meeting with his admirals. Kylo flinches in his chair when she does, but no one questions it; it’s entirely possible that no one is paying attention. This time, it relieves him more than it galls him.

What does gall him this time is the figure sitting in Phasma’s chair (most of the other empty ones have been filled in already, always more bodies in the ranks to keep the vacuum at bay, but even her successor does not seem quite ready to take that spot yet), a spoon in one hand and a parchment-and-bindings book in the other, snapping the volume shut and glaring at him.

He can’t react to her beyond how he already has; the battle at Crait had done much to destroy what little respect his officers had for him after the constant undermining he suffered (and, if he is completely honest with himself, his multiple military failures), so if he begins to look genuinely _unhinged_ instead of merely inexperienced and over-emotional, the situation could become… unsalvageable. Besides which, there is a not insignificant part of him that wants to try and get her back for ignoring him before, to (if he can) make her just as frustrated as she made him the last time she saw fit to appear in his head; and as much as he knows that it’s about as likely as a Selkath learning to breathe fire, he itches to try.

But his eyes keep sliding to that chair, almost against his will. (And he wishes with all his heart that he could justify it as _completely_ against his will, that it is an impulse from a fault that comes from somewhere outside him, but—but the fact remains. He defied Snoke at the height of his power. If there were something stronger, he would be able to feel its influence gripping him, if nothing else. This is all his own.) Rey still, _still_ does not speak. She doesn’t look away from him, either, except to nibble at whatever disgusting substance she has for food. Her eyes are accusatory, daring him to ignore her, or perhaps just demanding some kind of vengeance for him interrupting her reading.

(As if there is anything in that volume that he is not already aware of. Surely she hasn’t forgotten everything he told her at their last meeting?)

It takes perhaps the span of a minute for him to realize the other… potential problem about her presence. Perhaps she can’t see his surroundings or his present company, but she can still hear what he says whether it’s directed at her or at someone else; her appearance, with the kind of quiet efficiency he wishes half of his soldiers’ operations possessed, has made his presence at this meeting nearly pointless. If he lets anything slip—anything at all—she will relay it and her people will take advantage of it. And as much as he will pretend otherwise to protect himself, there will be no one else to blame.

And so, of course, she remains stubbornly there for the entirety of the hour-long affair. Kylo is effectively gagged, able only to give the barest acknowlegements and most stubbornly monosyllabic responses, trying desperately to think of ways he can communicate with _them_ without communicating with _her_.

She doesn’t even have the decency to leave when it’s ended. When he glances backwards as he leaves the room, she’s still there, still watching him.

He dips into the Force to will the door closed a little faster than its mechanisms would ordinarily allow, wishing that that wasn’t the only thing he could do to vent his frustration.

 

_Three._

Kylo enters his room, rounds a corner, and sees her sitting at his desk.

First, there is a desperate, defeated aggravation; again? Still? How long until he’s free of her? Is he meant to just go through the rest of his life waiting for her to show up and then sitting there in silence until she leaves?

Then, there’s just… exhaustion. He unclips his saber and tosses it towards his bed before sitting heavily on it himself. He was originally going to pop it open and inspect it—one of the vents has been shaking more than it ought to lately and he needs to find out why before the saber’s inherent instability starts tearing it apart—but he would need his desk for that. And as nebulous as her physical presence is when she appears like this, he would still feel strange trying to sit down in a chair that she is at least _visibly_ occupying.

Rey doesn’t seem to notice him at first, but either she hears his breathing (but didn’t hear anything else?) or she just senses him through whatever connection Snoke forced between them, because after half a minute she finally looks up. She’s facing away from him, so she doesn’t immediately see him there; but she turns her head at last, catches a glance, and her hands jump even though the rest of her body remains still. And then, once again, there’s the _thunk_ of a heavy paper book being slammed shut.

Kylo rolls his eyes. “I’ve already seen everything in there,” he says. “You can keep reading all you want.”

Rey narrows her eyes at him, but she turns back to the book and cracks it open again.

Silence falls for another solid minute before Kylo speaks up again. “Can you move?” he says. “I need to sit where you are.” And it sounds just as pathetic as he thought it would, but… well, it’s not like anyone else can hear, and it’s not like her opinion of him can get any _worse._

She turns her head just enough to raise an eyebrow at him, and then she looks back at what she’s doing. It’s somehow even more annoyingly dismissive than if she hadn’t even paused at all.

Kylo bites his tongue, picks up his lightsaber again and gets up to work on the floor instead.

 

_Four._

“This is ridiculous,” Kylo says.

Rey doesn’t disagree, but that might only be because she doesn’t respond at all. She’s crouched to the side of the room he was _going_ to try to train in, wires flashing in and out of existence as she touches them. If she ever talked to him, he would be curious to find out the limitations of this sight. He can see the tool in her hands, the tie in her hair, the various instruments clipped to her belt; but he can’t see the ground beneath her feet, or whatever the wires connect to.

But she isn’t talking, so he can’t ask.

 

_Five._

Rey says nothing. She doesn’t look at him. She is just… sitting there, curled up in her bunk, tinkering with scraps. Building.

“Rey,” he says. There’s a tremble to his voice that can only be fixed by shouting it out and he hates it, he _hates_ it, he hates her—himself— _it_.

She says nothing. She doesn’t move a muscle, but he knows she can hear him. She’s just ignoring him, again, still, _always_. And he wasn’t—he wasn’t going to, it never helps, but his throat clenches like a vise and when the words come out they’re too loud and too tight. “I know you can hear me,” he says. “You’ve been hearing me all this time. _What do you_ **_want_ ** _from me‽”_

Silence, pure and aching. Rey looks up like it’s what she was always planning to do; when she does, her eyes are horribly, awfully blank. No hate. No rage. But no forgiveness, either. Kylo expects her to be smart about it, or sarcastic, cutting; either try to get intel out of him or slice him to the bone, but when she speaks—

“Nothing,” she says.

The image snaps out when he blinks.

 

_Six._

Kylo wakes up tearing his throat raw, curling in on himself with a shout as pain sears hot in his side. With one hand, he grabs for his lightsaber, sends it shooting across the room to his palm; with the other, he presses down below his ribs, gasping frantic little breaths as he applies desperate pressure to a wound that isn’t there.

There is nothing. No blood, no burns, no gaping hole. But he _felt_ it. There is nothing the matter with his body, but he felt it—a blaster bolt he couldn’t deflect (or perhaps hadn’t wanted to, just in case it ricocheted somewhere more precious than) that _never happened to him._

He knows in that instant, but he smashes it down.

Later, he is debriefed; the rebels were found infiltrating one of the First Order’s bases. No definite casualties, but the Jedi girl had taken a hit, which was a step closer to victory than most officers had managed thus far. He looks so damned pleased, and Kylo wants nothing more than to lift him by the neck and wring it, to fling him against the wall and demand to know why he was so happy to have caused his Supreme Leader to wake up _screaming_ from an injury that was never his, but. But. But.

No one else knows. No one else can know. (They’ll all turn on him, like Luke, like Snoke, like Rey. He mustn’t.)

He leaves before that crawling rage can force him into anything he’ll regret. (He leaves before the concern can come nipping at its heels.)

 

_Seven._

Rey looks… acceptably healthy. There’s still a burning ache in Kylo’s side that doesn’t correspond to when _he_ moves wrong (but of course he still finds himself favoring it anyway), but she’s sitting upright when he sees her again. Her face is perhaps a little pale, a little haggard, but it might just be the result of the cold lighting on the flagship. She grew up in sunlight; most likely, she will always look a little bit strange under any other kind. Her clothes have seen better days, but that’s been true of her from before they met, and seems to be an integral part of being a Jedi anyway. If he looks, Kylo can see the outline of a bandage underneath her shirt, but he can’t tell its size or the severity of the wound underneath. Nor would she answer him if he asked.

(Irrationally, Kylo wishes he could apologize, but when he opens his mouth to do so, his throat closes up. It’s probably for the best.)

She’s curled up in his desk chair, her legs draped over the arm, the broken remains of her lightsaber in her hands. She’s made a little bit of progress, but not nearly as much as he’d have expected with apparently the collected knowledge of the ancient Jedi at her disposal—but perhaps Luke is just being particularly unhelpful with her education. Or she doesn’t have as much time as she needs.

Kylo sighs and sits on his bed again. (Once, just _once,_ he wishes she’d appear in a convenient location. Somewhere he doesn’t have to feel like his choices are to either go out of his own way or to see if he could phase right through her if he tried to sit where he had originally intended to.) He half-watches her work for a couple of minutes before he can’t take it anymore.

“You don’t have to build it just like it was,” he says. “There isn’t just one kind of lightsaber in the galaxy.” Which is… somewhat ridiculous of him to say; of course she knows that—she fought him, she fought Snoke’s guards, but here she is still managing to apparently miss the point.

“I know that,” she mutters. Kylo actually jerks back a little at the fact that she’s speaking at all. “I just don’t know if I want to take advice from _you._ ”

He tightens his jaw. That’s fair, he reminds himself. Rey may not have as many reasons to _dis_ trust him as she should, after his consistently spectacular failures to kill her when he had the chance, but she has no reasons whatsoever to trust him. “You learned to fight with a staff, yes?” he says. “You could remake it into a saberstaff.”

She looks up, cranes her neck to look him in the eye. “Are you giving me advice on how to _fight_ you?”

He blinks. “No, I’m—” But what else is this? What else _could_ it be? He wants her to be off-balance, doesn’t he? (Not that it matters much; even untrained, holding a weapon that wasn’t even her specialty, she had held her own with no particular issue. And she had only gotten better since then.) “I’m not,” he finishes.

Rey narrows her eyes at him. “So what _are_ you doing?”

He doesn’t have an answer to that, so he doesn’t try for one. “Go to Ilum if the crystal can’t be worked with,” he says instead.

“Ilum?” she echoes, frowning. “And you’ll be waiting there, I presume.”

It would be the smart thing to do, the reasonable thing. If he could capture her, he could even make another attempt to turn her to his side, to—

But it wouldn’t work. (Because she’s not like him, whispers something dark and disappointed.)

“I’m just trying to help,” he says, and gets up to leave the room.

 

_Eight._

The connection still doesn’t go so far as to let Kylo know where she is. He feels, sometimes, as though he can sense her—not nearby, never nearby, but if he goes still and doesn’t think about anything for long enough, he can get… an impression. Not of direction, not even really of distance, just of _presence._

He tries not to let that happen very often. There’s no pattern to the times Rey starts showing up in the corner of his vision, but dwelling on whatever bond is causing it can’t possibly help to make it go away.

(Except he finds himself doing it anyway, whenever he’s making a decision on where to send the fleet. If he was nearly incapacitated by her pain from a different arm of the Galaxy, he can’t imagine how terrible it must be in person—and more to the point, how terrible it would be to have _her_ figure out that side effect too. There may not be a sane, constructive way to use that power against him, but that doesn’t mean he feels comfortable with the thought of her knowing it in the first place.)

The end problem, of course, is that he can’t just avoid her forever. Rey is his enemy no matter how much she doesn’t have to be and how much he wishes that she wasn’t; it’s not in his nature, nor is it tactically advisable, to run from her until she stops appearing where she shouldn’t. He has to get to the root of this and pull it out before it does any more damage.

He takes a ship to Korriban.

* * *

He doesn’t know what he expected to find here. Korriban is a wasteland in a way that feels less like it had been wasted and more that it had never been worth living on at all, that it had sprung into being fully formed and already ruined beyond saving. It eats at him, hollows him out, makes him reflexively swallow like he’s stepping through a poorly calibrated airlock. He expected to hear things, to _see_ things, whispers at the corners of his senses, but there’s nothing here; it’s not as silent as the grave so much as it’s silent as the coffin inside it, buried so deep that even the sound of worms is too muffled to hear.

Kylo wants, desperately, to leave. But even less can he bear to go on like this. He needs to fix himself; where else can he go to find out _how?_

He leaves his accompaniment behind at the shuttle. They don’t show their apprehension; their posture stays motionlessly perfect, their faces hidden, but he can sense it. He can sense everything—sharper, deeper, with a clarity as sharp as a blade, a migraine-heavy pulsing of emotions that he knows aren’t his. There aren’t many things still living on this hellscape, but he knows where each one of them is, can feel their movements like they’re swimming beneath his own skin.

(Isn’t the Dark meant to strengthen him? Why does it _hurt?_ Has she managed, somehow, to worm her way so far into his consciousness that she’s poisoned his connection to this entire half of the Force?)

He starts walking. Tugging on the impulse pushing his feet just makes him feel sicker, somehow, so he lets it be. Whether he’s being led to his salvation or his death, at least all of this will be over.

The ground is treacherous, but looks like it used to be much worse; there’s a path down the cliff face, partially formed from erosion and collapse and partially formed from the ruins of ancient statues toppling over. It feels… constructed—not by physical hands, maybe not even by the influence of the ghosts that Kylo _knows_ are lurking in the shadows of these tombs. It pulls at him, his instincts bidding him turn and walk back to the ship and mark this down as a mistake.

He forges on. (He doesn’t stop to consider if he’s doing it out of stubbornness or because he’s afraid to find out if turning around is even an option anymore.)

The valley used to be fairly flat, judging by the bits and pieces of half-buried tombs jutting out of the dirt and sand. The ground evens out in the center into a dust-dry basin of red clay, spiderwebbed through with cracks. His boots scuff over the smaller fissures. He hears footsteps, feels a spark of _presence_ as bright as a supernova, an instant of power more ancient and enormous than Kylo has ever felt; when he turns, saber instantly alight in his hand, he sees a flash of pale blue, a mask, a hood—

He sees nothing. The ghost is gone. Kylo takes a second to breathe, to switch his lightsaber back off and return it to his belt, and even that delay feels crushing. He no longer has to avoid wondering whether he can physically make himself turn around and go back now—at least, not without a fight that he’s not sure he’d win.

The ghost had been so—but he didn’t recognize it. There are a thousand Sith Lords buried even just in this mountain range, most of their names and faces either lost to or erased from history; there is no way for him to know who it was. He doubts, on this planet of all planets, that they mean him _well._

(But what choice does he have?)

He keeps walking. The urge leads him away from the main valley, through a path that feels more like an accident than something that was intentionally carved out of the mountain, which in turn dead-ends inside a man-made cave. It’s not the entrance of a tomb, or it wasn’t meant to be. It feels somehow wrong to go inside—but the actual door is surely lost to one of the numerous collapses Kylo saw outside, and the ghost (it has to be the ghost; there’s no other explanation) won’t let him stop.

 _Leave me alone,_ he thinks—begs. “What do you want from me?” he asks instead, voice hushed in the stagnant, choking air.

Silence, but the presence returns. Kylo expects the shadows to shift around him, to morph into a humanoid shape, but it’s the _light_ again. He remembers hearing Master Luke’s stories of Dagobah, of the steady orbs of light somewhere in the distance that almost begged to be followed, but would only send you walking in circles until your death. He hadn’t been certain at the time whether it was meant to be some form of cryptic Jedi parable or if it was just something he told his students to scare and entertain the younger ones; it had done neither for Ben, but it all comes washing back now, and it—

Kylo turns to face it. It isn’t a ghost this time. It’s the end of a lightsaber, held with steady hands, the end too far away for him to feel the prickle of it but still kept carefully at neck level. Rey’s eyes stare back at him, flat and empty. Is that fury he can sense in her, or is it the planet itself balking at their intrusion?

“You’re not real,” she tells him. “You’re another illusion, or—or—or you’re just appearing from your fleet again. You can’t _fool_ me.”

Kylo jerks an ungraceful step back, drawing and igniting his own lightsaber, just in case. “Where are you?” he asks.

Rey narrows her eyes and takes a step forward. He answers with a step back, a flare of nerves coiling in the back of his head—it’s gone far enough that he feels her pain—he can’t fight her. “I’m not _stupid,_ ” she snaps. “Tell me where _you_ are.”

There’s no sense in hiding it. (There’s a lot of sense in hiding it. What is he thinking?) “Korriban,” he says. His eyes flick between the saber and her face. He doesn’t move.

Rey tenses almost imperceptibly more. (How did he not _sense_ her? He could sense everything else—) “Why?”

Anger won’t help. Anger will only draw them closer to a real conflict, and he never—he never knew how to draw out a fight without either party landing a blow. (If he’d paid closer attention, before—but it hadn’t felt like it mattered—) “I want to put an end to this,” he says tightly. “I want you out of my head.”

“Oh, _really,_ ” she says, and that’s all the warning he gets before she strikes. He reels back, flicking his saber up to deflect hers to the side, but she just rolls with the movement; the other end of her blade blazes to life and makes a clean sweep for his legs. Effortless. She listened to him.

He wishes she hadn’t. If she’d still been using the single-bladed saber, if she’d still been noticeably thinking through the forms when she wasn’t working purely on instinct, Kylo could have at least had more of a chance to figure out how to stop this without hurting either one of them—but with her weapon of choice…

“Is that why you led me here?” she demands, pressing forward. Kylo ducks under one slash, blocks the second, dodges the third. “To kill me?”

“No!” he says.

Rey doesn’t even need to say anything. The flat disbelief in her scoff is more than enough. Something twinges sharply in his shoulder when he twists out of the way of her next attack and he sees her flinch in turn, though she hides it well. He can feel her confusion as acutely as if it’s his own from this distance (or lack thereof); she’s noticed his sudden turn to pacifism, she must have, but she doesn’t ask. She just seems to assume—and rightly so, given their history, as much as it stings to admit it—that it must be some kind of obscure trick.

Not entirely for the first time, Kylo curses Snoke for what he made him into. If he dies tonight because he has to try and _avoid_ killing her and she doesn’t know and can’t guess at why—

Well, he supposes that at least he’ll take her down with him, probably, even if he doesn’t mean to. It’s not a comfort.

“You think I led you here,” Kylo says, desperate. “I didn’t. I was drawn here just like you were, I don’t want to fight you—”

“Don’t _lie_ to me,” Rey snaps. “I’m in your head, remember?”

“I wish I didn’t,” he says bitterly.

She takes another step forward and slashes savagely at his legs. His back hits the wall and that little knock to his balance is just barely enough that he botches the next block, and her lightsaber skids past his crossguard and straight into his forearm, straight through flesh and bone and flesh again until a third of his arm is lying on the ground between them.

His mind is somewhere else. Rey screams. He can’t. There’s no blood, of course, the wound cauterized as soon as it was made—but there is pain, and worse than that there is _absence;_ Kylo tries, irrationally, to move his fingers, and of course he can’t it’s ridiculous but he tries anyway and the stump of his forearm burns and he can’t look at it. He can’t look at anything. He reaches out with the Force to switch his saber off before it can hurt either of them (more) and he closes his eyes and slides down the wall and tries to remember what he was taught as a child.

“What,” Rey gasps. Her voice is shaking. Kylo doesn’t open his eyes to see if the rest of her is too. “What was that?”

There’s some animal instinct in him to cradle his injury, but that would require him to feel it and acknowledge _exactly_ what’s been done, and perhaps he’s too much of a coward to do that. “I tried to tell you,” he says. He’s dizzy, disoriented, mouth dry and blood feeling too thin and quick in his veins—Kylo has felt worse pain than this and fought through it, but that was when he was the only person in his head. He suspects horribly that it’s just echoing between them now, getting worse and worse with every ricochet, and eventually it’s going to—

No. It isn’t. He puts his head between his knees and tries not to think. He’s the source of this; if he can just get his own reaction under control, she can sort hers out, and this terrible feedback loop can _stop._ Breathe. Breathe.

“You didn’t want to fight me,” Rey says. “This was why? Did you know this would happen?”

Kylo frowns, but her words aren’t accusatory this time; they’re almost… horrified, in a way. It doesn’t make much sense, but there’s very little that he can do about it now. “Yes,” he says instead.

“You didn’t tell me.” Her voice is tight; the pain isn’t overwhelming anymore, but it’s still very present. Kylo gets the impression that that’s just what they’ll have to deal with, now.

“I didn’t think you would listen,” he says. Too late, the thought crosses his mind that he could have… he could have hit the wall, stubbed his toe on something, twisted one of his joints until the tendons started to protest; anything that wouldn’t cause any real damage but would at least get the point across. “I thought that if I came here, I could find something that could separate us.” He thought the ghost had been leading him to freedom, or to death. It had just been leading him to _her,_ and she didn’t have the decency to be either.

(He’s so tired. He wants to go home, he finds himself thinking, plaintive as a child and not the commander of an entire army—but there’s no such thing as a home, is there? He destroyed it. There won’t be another.)

“I’m sorry,” she says. Kylo feels a hand on his wrist—the one that’s still attached, anyway—and he instinctively flinches away, twitching his head up to look at her. Rey’s face is drawn, but determined, as always. (She’ll never stop; he knows that now better than he ever could before. She’ll never stop. There’s nothing he can do.) “I didn’t know.”

He shrugs and looks away again. His eyes slide over his disembodied hand and he tries very hard not to see it. “You couldn’t have known,” he says, but it’s really more of a stab in the dark than anything; for someone he’s been jammed into a Force bond with, he really has so little of an idea of what she’s up to at any given moment. “I only found out by—by coincidence.”

“When I was shot,” Rey says, dawning realization. “You felt it?”

Perhaps it requires a response. Kylo doesn’t give one.

“So what… what do we do?”

“We,” he echoes blankly. He breathes out a laugh. “I thought you made your position on working with me _very_ clear. Don’t you?” He reaches for his saber, clips it back onto his belt, makes a move to stand.

Rey jerks to her feet and stands between him and the crack in the wall that served as a door. “It wasn’t _you_ I didn’t want to work alongside,” she says. “You know that.”

He does. “I killed my father,” he says instead. “You think I still have a place next to my mother?”

Rey doesn’t so much as blink. “Don’t you think that’s for her to decide?”

Kylo’s jaw tightens. “The whole rebellion wants me dead.”

“And they want me alive.” She softens, but not in a way that seems like she’s relenting. “I’m not asking you to join the Resistance. I don’t think… anyone would be really comfortable with that. But you don’t have to stay where you are, Kylo. And you don’t have to be alone.”

He can’t. He can’t listen to this, he can’t look at her, he can’t—the corners of his eyes prickle and he _hates_ that she can feel it. “What do you want from me?” he asks her again, and in every time he’s been choked or cut or hit or forced to his knees or knocked to the ground, for every time he’s tasted dirt or blood or both on his tongue, he has never felt so defeated. He knows it’s written in every single line of him, whether she’s privy to his emotions or not.

Rey holds out her hand. “Just come with me,” she says. “We’ll figure it out.”

He can’t. He won’t. (The First Order won’t miss him. The soldiers waiting back at the shuttle won’t wait for him.)

He reaches out and lets her pull him into the light.


End file.
